Jack Langelaan

Jack Langelaan

Four years ago, Jack Langelaan scaled up his research to take on a different challenge. In 2011, Langelaan led an international team that won the Green Flight Challenge, a NASA program intended to spur private development of fuel-efficient small airplanes. "We were not the first to fly an electric-powered airplane," he says. "But we were the first to demonstrate that electric-powered flight can be practical."

Jack Langelaan, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, sees many additional possibilities for so-called drones than just delivering packages -- for civil pursuits ranging from crop surveys to low-altitude meteorology. Fulfilling these visions, he says, will require developing planes that can think, or at least react, for themselves.